Everyday I bike down the same narrow cobble street. I peddle amongst the now familiar buildings, hearing the everyday sights and sounds that are now nothing more than ordinary. Yet the ‘everydayness’ of the street can be and will be ripped away in an instant, torn from my routine the moment I leave Amsterdam and embark upon a new adventure. And then, later upon returning or ‘re’-visiting I am sure I will feel the urge to once again ride down the street. I will lust to relive what is now a routine experience.
I start with this example because it demonstrates the strange power of place and memory. And how it is not only until we leave or a place is taken away from us that we realize its value and function as a vault for the past.
A friend sent me this music video by a band called Death Cab for Cutie (yes-a melancholy band title for melancholy music) which I believe is a song about the fires in California.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmpMQA0qfuM
However what the video beautifully demonstrates is our reliance and relationship to place and pictures as fundamental links to our imagined histories. It’s funny the video at one point brought a tear to my eye. For me the point it was making was so potent. It’s not only the place that was being burned, but also the landscape’s embedded memories. The tangible places, pictures, and things have stories behind them, and entrenched in the stories are layers of emotion.
I cannot begin to describe the strange sensation of returning to a familiar place, whether it be a diner your family once stopped at during a road trip or the park you played at as a kid. The sights, smells, and sounds are a locus of the past, memorials to smiles, sadness and suspense that was once you. When re-visiting it you are overwhelmed with the feelings. At locations and within things we build up stacks of experiences. The more time we invest in a place or item the taller and fuller the sediment. It is only when you revisit these sentimental shrines that you can relive the sensation of what has been. Yet funnily enough often upon returning the experience does not add to those which were, but instead the tower of memories suddenly crashes and crumbles. You find yourself amid a pile of recollection rubble desperately scrambling to examine each piece and enjoy it as if within an ambiance associated with lost love.
There is something beautiful about the process. It is a rare point where you can actually feel the future and past embrace and engage in a sweet melancholy kiss of memory. The experience is like a hug from a long lost friend; each person has long since gone in different directions and no longer knows one another. However in that moment of reunion you can feel the visceral warmth of meaning, as if there was no such thing as clocks, time, and change. The warmth of reminiscence suspends temporality and you are caught in-between the here-and-now and the there-and-then.
What I find interesting is the relation of pictures to place and people. I am fascinated by an image’s power to (re)make memory. Pictures are a sort of ‘liminal memory’, they are grounded in a moment but when we look back at the slice of reality our imagination takes care of the non-visual. I would argue our imagination even often intensifies the other senses and emotions. For instance I have very few pictures from when I was living in Mexico because I did not have a camera. Now when I recollect my time in Merida, I have a sort of emotional lack, I actually do not relate the place to a special spot full of fond of memories. I have memories, but they do not have the same energy of those from other travels. I think if I was physically back in Mexico I would be overwhelmed by and feel the phantoms of the past, but now the place and corresponding experiences lie emotionally dormant in my mind. Yet when I remember my time in India I experience an overwhelming sensation. I experience pieces of love, lust, and longing fitted as parts of a general memory puzzle. A puzzle of content, but always with a piece missing because I know I am somewhere else; thoughts of Varanasi are merely ghosts of encounters. However, I think this is due to the fact that I have framed India, isolated many of my daily experiences through photographs. I have taken many memories out of context and scrutinized and scrapbooked them so they stick out from the whirlwind of experience. Capturing the colors, creatively collecting the candor of everyday day life has allowed me to ‘create’ Varanasi, piece it together, and properly place emotion at each seam of events. I was in Mexico for a much longer period of time, but did not isolate items of remembrance through images (not having a camera). Instead they float along in a dream like state trapped within my imagination (although, perhaps the fact that I visited India for a shorter time prevented the place from becoming ‘everyday’, or ‘common’. In otherwords it still retained its spectacularness vs. perhaps Mexico became ordinary for me….). Nonetheless I think pictures through framing and isolation, create, enhance, and embalm rather than purely mirror memory.
Yet you could then argue that India is just a special place (I mean as a ‘westerner’ for me it was a ‘spectacle’, the ‘other’ and quite exotic), but then I think about Israel, which is less exotic. I was only there for 2 days, yet I still feel a connection to the short experience, I have tactile memories from the buildings, sights, sounds, and smells. The place/experience seems to have changed me, touched me, and been a trip I will remember well… yet I wonder if it is to do once again with the camera; that I took so many pictures have framed the place in my head so beautifully.
I think pictures purify experience; they isolate the visual. Seeing is captured and the other senses are filled in by the imagination. We restore in the smells, the sounds, the tastes, and touch of the air in our mind. And actually often the imagination does a better job than reality at recreating these feelings. It enhances sensitivity, lets us simmer in the imagined but once real sensations. ‘In’ an actual place we are ambushed by so many sensory inputs. We do not know which to focus on or if to focus at all, and instead let them all drizzle over us as part of the soft soothing soaking up of experience. But our imagination has an amazing power to ring them out, squeeze them of sensation and let us bathe in our human understanding. We add emotion to these feelings and package the pictures as memories to constantly recall and enjoy.
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